Like many of the countries of South America, both Peru and Argentina seemed to have been left stuck by the Spanish between a vanished colonial notion of glory and a future that had never arrived; in desperation, often, not fully European and not really themselves, they tried to fill the empty spaces with pomp. Bolivia, by comparison, gave an impression of self-containment: a poor country, yes, but one that never seemed to have expected to get rich.
For me, then, Bolivia was enchantment. I drew back the curtains in my room, and saw everything picked out with uncanny sharpness in the summer light. Mountains almost four miles high stood at the end of narrow streets, and at night the whole town glowed with the lights of the little houses around the hills. Even though the El Alto slum I visited one morning was a shocking place, with its corrugated-iron shacks and its unpaved roads, compared with what I was used to seeing, in impoverished Bombay or even in L.A., it did not look so desperate.
The Bolivian, of course, encountering these same scenes, would see something different. One day I stumbled out of my hotel, the Donald Duck cartoons of its breakfast room reeling through my mind and, still a little woozy from the altitude (or from the gallons of coca tea I’d been drinking to offset its effects), walked into a demonstration. The whole central promenade – the present tense, as it had seemed to me at first – was taken over, block after block, by ragged campesinos, shouting out their dissatisfactions, as they would protest selling natural gas to America when bringing down the government this past October. Every few minutes a firecracker went off, and the street was rent with a thunderous explosion. The Indian women, engagingly, cupped their hands behind their ears as if to protect themselves from the moment.
As I stood there, watching the banners marching past – “The Association of Joyless Workers”;”Generation Sandwich” – a shoeshine boy came up to me (an emblem of escape, he might have thought) and confessed his longing to go to America. To get rich? I asked, or to claim freedom? or perhaps to see Britney Spears in person?
“No,” he said. He wanted to kill people with the U.S. Army. His mouth was covered by a scarf, to protect himself from the fumes of the traffic, and it was easy to imagine he was one of the thousands of Bolivian children who could neither read nor write. Some such children actually live with their convict fathers in the local prison and are glad for the relative safety. “It’s so calm here,” I said, thinking of the Lima I’d just come from, the Calcutta and Miami where I often found myself. “Calm?” said the boy. He looked at me as if I were mad.
In the days that followed, I duly visited all the sites mentioned in the guidebooks: the high, lonely emptiness of the Altiplano, as desolate as a pair of panpipes played on a quiet evening; the strange enigmas of Tiahuanaco, one of the great unexcavated mysteries of the world – a few statues looking out on the unbroken plains all around, the sun casting huge shadows across the nearby hills, and the handful of tourists here this New Year’s Eve reduced to stick figures in the distance; the sleepy towns around Lake Titicaca. Yet all these, of course, belonged to the tourist’s Bolivia, and I longed to see how this world looked to the people who actually lived there. On my last day in the country, therefore, I decided to visit the final destination mentioned in my guidebook.
Just three minutes away from the Prado, where children were flying balloons, and a merry-go-round, its cars shaped like the characters of Pokémon, waited to delight them, there stood a large building on a street called Calle Canada Strongest, which looked like an impregnable fortress. I slipped between two handsome façades looking out on the main boulevard, mansions from the nineteenth century, and instantly found myself away from the commotion of the crowds and in front of this monumental place, the San Pedro Prison.
Some convicts here maintain jobs – to support themselves in the prison’s self-sufficient economy – and one inmate, my guidebook pointed out, had decided to put together a living of sorts by offering visitors tours of his new home. San Pedro was said to be a microcosm of the society around it: some people lived in “cells” that were as well-appointed as five-star hotel rooms, while others were squeezed, by the hundred, into spaces originally intended for twenty-five.
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